Invader

Invader – Biography and Original Screenprints: Collecting the Space Invaders Artist

Invader is an anonymous French street artist, born in Paris in 1969, who has never shown his face: he works masked, often at night, and appears pixelated in photographs and interviews. Since 1998 he has fixed ceramic-tile mosaics to the walls of cities across the world, each one based on the low-resolution characters of 1970s and 1980s video games – above all the aliens of the arcade game Space Invaders (1978), from which he takes his name. His ‘invasions’ have reached Paris, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, and even the International Space Station. Alongside his street work he devised ‘Rubikcubism’, pictures built from Rubik’s Cubes, and has produced a substantial body of limited-edition screenprints, many of them published in London.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers Invader’s screenprint Scooter (2015), a signed edition of 88 released for the exhibition Wipe Out in Hong Kong. The image shows the artist’s own scooter, covered over the years in stickers and tags left by fellow street artists. Like every work in our stock, it was chosen for the quality of the printing, the edition details, its provenance and its condition. To be told when further prints arrive, simply ‘follow the artist’ on this page.

Paris, 1998: giving the pixel a physical form

On his official website the artist dates the project to 1998, when he chose the weather-resistant ceramic tile as the physical equivalent of the pixel. Every mosaic is logged in a database – photograph, ‘date of birth’, address – and given a code combining the city and a serial number; each piece scores between 10 and 100 points, and a city’s score is the sum of its works. A typical invasion comprises 20 to 50 pieces. From the outset he ran an online Space Shop, selling editions such as the self-assembly Invasion Kit to fund the project. Solo shows followed quickly: New Player Insert Coins in Paris in 1999 and Same Player Shoot Again at Galerie Almine Rech in 2000. In 2000 he also took part in group exhibitions in Geneva and Bern, and in 2001 in the Lyon Biennale, the year of his first invasion of Hong Kong.

The London years: Lazarides and Pictures on Walls (2004-2011)

Britain has played an unusually important part in Invader’s career. London, Manchester and Newcastle were all invaded, and the third of his invasion guides, Invasion in the UK (2008), is devoted to them. In 2006 he showed in Spank the Monkey at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, and in Hype at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London, where he returned in 2007. Lazarides, the gallery that helped carry British street art into the market, gave him three solo exhibitions: Bad Men Part II and Invasion London (2007), Low Fidelity (2009) and Attack of the Space Waffles (2011); in 2016 he featured in the gallery’s anniversary show Still Here. Most significantly for print collectors, from 2005 to 2015 he worked with Pictures on Walls (POW), the London publisher and printer, which issued screenprints such as Aladdin Sane (2014). Meanwhile, Rubikcubism took shape from 2004: works of roughly 300 cubes grouped into the series Bad Men, Masterpieces and Low Fidelity.

Rubik Mona Lisa, the 1,000th mosaic and Art in the Streets

The Rubik Mona Lisa (2005), assembled from 330 cubes, was first shown at the Galerie Bellecour in Lyon; on 23 February 2020 it sold at Artcurial in Paris for €480,200, around four times its estimate. In June 2011 his 1,000th Parisian mosaic was marked by the exhibition 1000 at La Générale in Paris, and the same year he was included in Art in the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Further solo shows took him to Cologne, Vienna, Rome, Tokyo and New York.

Into orbit, and a retrospective of the prints (2012-2024)

With Art4Space in 2012 he sent a mosaic into the stratosphere beneath a high-altitude balloon. In 2014 he launched the free Flash Invaders app, which lets passers-by score points by photographing his mosaics; that year nearly all of his third Hong Kong invasion (48 works) was scrubbed away by the authorities, and in 2015 a replica of Hong Kong Phooey (HK_58) made almost HK$2 million at Sotheby’s. In March 2015 the ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti fixed the mosaic Space2 to the hatch of the European Columbus laboratory on the ISS. In May 2015 Wipe Out, at PMQ in Hong Kong, revisited the city’s erasure – the occasion for the Scooter print. In 2017, after thieves posing as council workers stripped mosaics from Paris walls, the city filed a complaint. A full retrospective of his works on paper, Prints on Paper, was held at the MGLC in Ljubljana (22 December 2020 – 18 May 2021), and from 17 February to 5 May 2024 Invader Space Station filled nine floors of the former Libération building in Paris.

The prints: screenprinting, publishers and how editions are identified

Invader’s printed work is almost entirely in screenprint, a process ideally suited to the flat colour of pixel art; some editions add embossing, which gives the sheet the relief of a tiled wall, or metallic foil. According to the MGLC, most prints are self-published and tied to a particular exhibition or action, while those issued by Pictures on Walls between 2005 and 2015 form a distinct, London-published group – auction catalogues describe them as ‘published by Pictures on Walls, London’, sometimes with test proofs inscribed ‘TP’. Subjects fall into three families: video-game characters, Rubikcubist variations, and images in which the invaders slip into existing works of art or hide in binary compositions. Many titles borrow the code of a street piece, as with LA_56. To our knowledge there is no published catalogue raisonné of the prints; the Prints on Paper catalogue (MGLC, 2021) offers a visual survey, and an edition is identified by title, year, format and edition size. See our guide to what makes an original print.

Collecting Invader prints: a buyer’s guide

Authentication. Unlike Banksy, whose work is certified by Pest Control, Invader does not operate a public authentication service for his prints, and his website makes no mention of certificates for editions. Confidence therefore rests on provenance – the Space Shop, the original exhibition, the publisher – and on the seller. Our guarantees are set out on our authenticity page.

Edition and numbering. Edition sizes range from a few dozen to several hundred (88 for Scooter). Check that the number, the declared total and any proofs agree; see the printing.

Signature. Signed editions are signed in pencil, and a genuine hand signature never matches another exactly. Some editions are stamped rather than signed and should be described as such.

Dimensions. The sheet must match the published format precisely; a discrepancy of a few centimetres is a classic sign of a counterfeit.

Mosaics and Aliases. The artist does not regard tiles removed from a wall as authentic, and warns that thieves rebuild ‘replicas’ from shop-bought tiles. For collectors he makes Aliases: exact replicas of a street work, each with an ID card referring to it, and only one per work.

Condition. Inspect embossing, foil, margins and any light-staining, and choose conservation framing.

The gallery also selects prints by artists who carried street and pop culture onto paper: Shepard Fairey, JonOne, Robert Combas, Roy Lichtenstein and Victor Vasarely. Explore contemporary art and our prints and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Invasion in the UK: Invasion Guide 3, 2008 · Prints on Paper, Ljubljana, MGLC, 2021 · Invader – official website · MGLC – Prints on Paper · Bonhams – Aladdin Sane, Pictures on Walls · ESA – Space2 on Columbus · Over the Influence – exhibition history